Justin Sherrill – Page 111 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2017/01/142017/01/13

In Other BSDs for 2017/01/14

This turned into a BSD User Group event list, which makes me happy. There was nothing like that 3 or 5 or whatever years ago.

OPNsense 16.7.13 released
Documenting NetBSD’s scheduler tweaks
NetBSD 7.1_RC1 available
12? PowerBook G4 PT5 – Electronic Battle Weapon
WiFi: 11n hostap mode added to athn(4) driver, testers wanted
Would you bother learning PFSense when you are comfortable with Mikrotik for budget firewall requirements?
2017 presentation proposals
BPF and formal verification (via)
KnoxBUG is having a Raspberry Pi installfest on 01/31. I’ll post a reminder.
KnoxBUG is also planning an OpenRC talk in February, though no date yet.
And here’s the writeup from the most recent KnoxBUG meetup.
People in NYCBUG are looking to have a classical code reading group set up – no date yet, but it sounds fun. (This has happened before as a one-shot event.)
Craig Maloney is speaking about Ansible at the next SemiBUG meeting, this Tuesday. This meeting may be streamed. I’ll put a reminder up on Monday, too, and link to the stream if I know it.

2017/01/13

Some removals that may not matter

The ncv(4), nsp(4), and stg(4) drivers are now removed from DragonFly. So is the portal file system. Also, though not a removal, vm.swapcache.use_chflags now defaults to 0. Does this affect you? Almost certainly not! I feel compelled to point it out, though, just in case there’s that one person who didn’t want a surprise.

2017/01/12

BSDNow 176: Linking your world

This week’s BSDNow has extended notes about FreeBSD and lld, the LLVM linker, plus notes on the NetBSD scheduler, OpenBSD changes, and so on. It’s very ecumenical.

2017/01/112017/01/10

Another i915 video update

The i915 driver has been updated to match Linux 4.6 – this is of most benefit to the owners of newest hardware, but the commit message lists what has changed, for owners of Haswell series GPUs and later.

2017/01/10

Significant memory handling changes in DragonFly

If you are on DragonFly -master, now is a good time to update. Matthew Dillon has been changing how DragonFly handles locking and memory use, with differences in the vmstat structure and page coloring, some memory settings, and many other locking changes. I am only linking to a few examples. If you don’t want to dig through those links for performance numbers, he summarized his changes and their effects in a post to users@.

2017/01/09

NUMA and DragonFly

That’s Non-Uniform Memory Access, to disambiguate. Matthew Dillon’s changing how memory is allocated in DragonFly. NUMA is been a long-discussed and complex topic for a long time, so I will point at the initial commits and call it “a developing situation”.

2017/01/082017/01/07

Lazy Reading for 2017/01/08

I hope you have lots of time to read today.

SpaceVim – Like Spacemacs, but for Vim. A Vim … distribution? (via)
Mid-century modern electronics. (via)
Open Source Won. So, Now What? (via)
A Historical Geography of RPG Playing
2016 year-end link clearance. Going down the rabbit hole of links to links.
Data formats of Rogue One (via)
Architects on Death Star design. A bit clickbaity, I know. (also via)
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, looking just at user interfaces. (via)
Great Talks and Presentations at 33C3 (I think via)
Truffle Hog, a clever search-for-accidentally-committed-keys script. (via)
Hacker News, like any news aggregate, has now reached the astroturfing / advertising point. (related)
Goodbye to GNU Libreboot (via)
Irssi 1.0.0 Released And here’s the XKCD cartoon to match. (via)
fortran.io, a FORTRAN web framework. (via)
A Tourist’s Guide to the LLVM Source Code
Story behind malloc(0) standardization (via)
python 3k17. Perl’s is the only scripting language I know that successfully navigated major version changes – for compatibility, at least.
zz: a smart and efficient directory changer
Internet of Shit and CES. Of note: 42tea, where you need a smartphone to do what only maybe needs a timer and thermometer.
chmod 777. Not sure if real.
The many lives of Packard Bell. I hated these.

2017/01/072017/01/06

In Other BSDs for 2017/01/07

There’s always a rush of links after a holiday, as people sit at home and catch up on what they’ve wanted to do.

2016 computer review A lot of people like that X1.
For God’s sake, secure your Mongo/Redis/etc! This is why services don’t get automatically started after installation via ports/pkgsrc. (via)
openbsd changes of note 5
OPNsense 16.7.12 released
Lumina version 1.2.0 Released
Netgate Taps InfoSec Global for pfSense Code Review
A pretty splash screen for the Chrome Pixel and OpenBSD. (via)
Hotplugging RAM – uvm_hotplug(9), the Xen balloon(4) driver and portmasters’ FAQ
pkgsrc-2016Q4 released
This is why I try to be specific when talking about BSD book author Michael W. Lucas.
turn your network inside out with one pf.conf trick
Get your name in the relayd book

2017/01/06

BSDNow 175: How the Dtrace saved Christmas

This week’s BSDNow: no interview, but a lot of link summary. Does that title make sense if you are outside the U.S.? No matter.

2017/01/05

UEFI booting on DragonFly

If you have a NVMe-capable EFI BIOS on your machine, you should be able to safely install DragonFly, using these instructions from Matthew Dillon. It’s not part of the installer, yet.

2017/01/042017/01/04

NYCBUG, installfest, tonight

NYCBUG is meeting tonight for an installfest, plus dinner and drinks afterward. Attend if you are close, and especially if you want to get BSD on some odd hardware.

Update: canceled!

2017/01/03

32 terabytes of swap on DragonFly

Matthew Dillon has made some changes to DragonFly’s swap handling, and his explanation notes that the theoretical max swap space is now 32 terabytes. He even had to change field sizes to accommodate the new, bigger numbers.

2017/01/012016/12/29

Lazy Reading for 2017/01/01

I almost scheduled this for 2016/01/01.

All the talks from Systems We Love. I linked to one of these presentations in another week, but here’s all of them. (via)
The little book about OS development. (via)
Getting the Amiga 500 Online. (via)
Awesome window manager framework version 4.0 changes. I know there’s a few users out there. (via)
Virtual reality interfaces. I think they are all hypothetical, but I like them. The source link has a nice summary set of images.
The case of the four unlabeled toggle buttons. In general when someone sees a button, they must click on it.
Coding Standards Horror Story. Not the usual coding horror story. (via)
Virtuapin Mini, virtual pinball in an actual cabinet. Found via the actual Coding Horror site which has nice internal pictures and more details on available software.
Anydice.com. Sum probabilities for different dice combinations. (via)
How Your Cup of Tea Explains the Universe. (via)

2017/01/01

How’s the speed?

I went to a more simple format for the page. New year, new layout, and so on. How is the load time for people?

2016/12/312016/12/29

In Other BSDs for 2016/12/31

Last anything for the year!

Cohabiting FreeBSD and Gentoo Linux on a Common ZFS Pool (via)
Gave 9front a try under bhyve. It boots. (Restrictions Apply) (via)
Foxy’s (mis)Adventures with NetBSD (via)
FreeBSD Foundation Announces New Uranium Level Donation (via)
Peter Hansteen on OpenBSD and you (slides)
So that’s what water-cooling looks like.
FreeNAS Hard Drive Troubleshooting Guide. (via)
MWL’s 2016 wrap-up. One of his 2017 goals: “Be sufficiently flexible to kick Ray Percival in the head at BSDCan.” Also more BSD books.

2016/12/302016/12/26

Something for Hyper-V and DragonFly users

If you are using DragonFly under Hyper-V, Sepherosa Ziehau’s been making additional commits to improve compatibility. What’s it like? I don’t know; I haven’t tried Hyper-V yet.

2016/12/29

BSDNow 174: 2016 Highlights

BSDNow 174 this week presents a recap of the 2016 year, including chunks of interviews you may have missed.

2016/12/292016/12/26

Binutils 2.27 now default

The version of binutils used in DragonFly is now 2.27 by default. This will make the most difference to you if you want to work with Link Time Optimization.

2016/12/282019/08/01

More secure browsing

Matthew Dillion mentioned his changed tutorial on secure web browsing on DragonFly, though I imagine it applies to other systems too. The trick is to use an isolated user account for running a web browser, and he includes the various steps to do so smoothly in the tutorial web page.

2016/12/272016/12/26

Post-Haswell GPU fix

For anyone with a newer CPU – Broadwell, Skylake, etc. – there was a memory leak in the video driver. It would take several weeks of continuous operation to have an effect, but in any case, it’s fixed. This only affected DragonFly 4.7 users with the appropriate CPUS and the Intel video driver.